Remarks As Prepared for Delivery by William J. Perry Secretary of Defense John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University May 13, 1996
In a famous 1837 lecture at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson
asked his audience, If there is any period one would desire to
be born in, is it not the age of Revolution, when the old and the
new stand side by side, when the energies of all men are searched
by fear and by hope, when the historic glories of the old can be
compensated by the rich possibilities of the new?
Like Emerson, we, too, live in an age of revolution: In
politics, with the ending of the Cold War; in economics, with the
dramatic growth in global trade; and in technology, with the
continuing explosion of information systems. Today, we are
living Emerson's desire in a revolutionary era of rich
possibilities, an era when our energies are searched by fear
and by hope. Our hope is symbolized by the success of democracy
around the globe, by the growth of new global trade
relationships, by the expansion of global communications, and by
the explosion of information. Indeed, in this revolutionary new
era, the term closed society is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Even those states that still desire isolation find it
increasingly difficult to achieve. Indeed, it is impossible to
achieve if they want to reap the benefits of the global economy,
as China discovered during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, when
they could not control the fax machines and modems.
But along with this hope, our energies in this revolutionary
era are also searched by fear: Fear of the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction; fear of ethnic hatreds ripping
asunder existing states; fear of terrorism by extremist groups;
and fear of aggression by rogue nations freed from the
constraints of their former Cold War alliances. For many, this
revolutionary new era has meant a decreased sense of personal
safety, symbolized by pictures of the bodies being carried from
the Federal building in Oklahoma or of the gassed passengers
rushing from a Tokyo subway.
The stark contrast between our hopes and our fears makes
clear that this revolutionary new era is characterized by the
increased capacity of humankind for good and for evil. It also
makes clear that in addition to revolutions in politics,
economics and technology, there must also be a revolution in our
thinking about security strategy.
The security of the United States continues to require us to
maintain strong military forces to deter and, if necessary, to
defeat those who threaten our vital national interests -- and we
do. But today, the United States also has a unique historical
opportunity, the opportunity to prevent the conditions for
conflict and to help create the conditions for peace. Today, I
want to talk to you about how America's security policy in the
post-Cold War era requires us to take advantage of that
opportunity: to make preventive defense the first line of
defense of America, with deterrence the second line of defense,
and with military conflict the third and last resort.
Preventive defense may be thought of as analogous to
preventive medicine. Preventive medicine creates the conditions
which support health, making disease less likely and surgery
unnecessary. Preventive defense creates the conditions which
support peace, making war less likely and deterrence unnecessary.
Twice before in this century, America has had similar
opportunities to prevent the conditions for conflict. After
World War I, the United States had the opportunity to help
prevent conflict by joining the League of Nations and engaging
the world. Instead, we chose to isolate ourselves from the
world. That strategy of isolationism, coupled with the
Europeans' strategy of reparations and revenge, utterly failed to
prevent the conditions for future conflict. In fact, it helped
create them. And over three hundred thousand Americans paid with
their lives in a second World War. After World War II, America
was determined to learn from that costly lesson -- this time we
chose the path of engagement. We sought to prevent conflict from
recurring. Through our engagement in the United Nations and by
our leadership, we promoted a post-war program of reconciliation
and reconstruction, in sharp contrast to the reparation and
revenge practiced after World War I. Our most dramatic national
effort to prevent future conflict was announced at Harvard's 1947
commencement by George C. Marshall. It came to be called the
Marshall Plan.
Marshall acted at a pivotal moment in this century. Like
Emerson, Marshall saw America in a world standing between two
eras, a period Marshall described as between a war that is over
and a peace that is not yet secure. At this pivotal moment,
Marshall set forth a strategy of preventive defense. The soldier
in Marshall wanted desperately to prevent war from recurring --
the statesman in Marshall found a way. His vision was of a
Europe -- from the Atlantic to the Urals -- united in peace,
freedom and democracy. His tool for realizing his vision was a
plan for rebuilding a European continent that had been
physically, economically and spiritually shattered by war.
The Marshall Plan rested on three premises: That what
happens in Europe affects America; that economic reconstruction
in Europe was critical to preventing another war; and that
economic reconstruction of Europe would not happen without US
leadership. Acting on these premises, Marshall and his
generation rebuilt Europe and they led America to assume the
mantle of world leadership. Their preventive defense program was
successful in creating the conditions of peace and stability
wherever applied.
In the end, however, Marshall's vision was only half
realized, because Joseph Stalin slammed the door on Marshall's
offer of assistance. Within a matter of years, the world was
divided into two armed camps. And deterrence, not prevention,
became the overarching security strategy of the Cold War. While
geopolitics doomed Marshall's efforts at preventive security for
Europe, the technology of nuclear weapons made a global war too
terrible to contemplate -- so deterrence worked. Now, after more
than forty dangerous years of the nuclear balance of terror, the
Cold War is over.
Today, we are at another pivotal moment in history, a point
between two centuries -- a point between a Cold War that is over
and a peace that is not yet secure. Today, the world does not
need another Marshall Plan. But to ensure that it is our hopes
and not our fears that will be realized in this revolutionary
age, we do need to build on Marshall's core belief that the
United States must remain a global power, and that our best
security policy is one which prevents conflict.
Just as the Marshall Plan was based on a set of premises, so
today our program of preventive defense rests on its own set of
premises. First, that fewer weapons of mass destruction in fewer
hands makes America and the world safer. Second, that more
democracy in more nations means less chance of conflict in the
world. And third, that defense establishments have an important
role to play in building democracy, trust and understanding in
and among nations.
From these premises follows the conclusion that for the post-
Cold War world to be one of peace, and not conflict, America must
lead the world in preventing the conditions for conflict and in
creating the conditions for peace. In short, we must lead with a
policy of preventive defense. So we have created an innovative
set of programs in the Defense Department to do just that -- some
national, some international. They include: The Cooperative
Threat Reduction program to reduce the nuclear weapon complex of
the nuclear nations of the former Soviet Union; the counter-
proliferation program to deal with the threat of the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; the Framework
Agreement to eliminate the nuclear weapons program of North
Korea; and the Partnership for Peace to begin the integration of
27 nations of Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia into
the European security structure. I will describe the progress in
some of these programs, and how they are, in fact, creating
conditions which prevent conflict.
Nowhere is preventive defense more important than in
countering the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons. During the Cold War, the world lived with the nightmare
prospect of global nuclear holocaust, and the United States and
the Soviet Union relied on deterrence, a balance of terror known
as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. Today, the threat of
global nuclear holocaust is vastly reduced, but we face the new
danger that weapons of mass destruction will fall into the hands
of terrorist groups or rogue states. The threat of retaliation
may not matter much to a terrorist group or a rogue nation --
deterrence may not work with them. This new class of
undeterrables may be madder than MAD.
The aspiration of these rogue nations to obtain weapons of
mass destruction is set against the backdrop of the
disintegration of the former Soviet Union. This disintegration
meant that instead of one nuclear empire, we were left with four
new states, each with nuclear weapons on their soil: Russia,
Kazakstan, Ukraine, and Belarus. The depressed economies of
these nations created a buyer's market for weapons of mass
destruction, including the materials, infrastructure, and work-
force, and the unsettled political conditions made it potentially
harder to protect those weapons and materials.
The increase in demand for nuclear weapons, and the
potential increase in supply of weapons, material and know-how
have required us to augment our Cold War strategy of deterrence
with a post-Cold War strategy of prevention. The most effective
way to prevent proliferation is to dismantle the arsenals that
already exist. Fortunately, through our Cooperative Threat
Reduction program with Russia and the other nuclear states of the
former Soviet Union, we have the dismantlement well started.
Through a defense program created by Senators Sam Nunn and
Richard Lugar, we have helped Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and
Kazakstan dismantle thousands of nuclear warheads and destroy
hundreds of missiles, bombers and silos. This January, I
personally detonated an SS-19 silo at Pervomaysk, which once had
700 nuclear warheads aimed at targets in the United States. By
the end of the month, this missile field will have been converted
to a wheat field. By the end of the year, Kazakstan, Ukraine and
Belarus will be entirely free of nuclear weapons. We are also
using Nunn-Lugar funds to help these nations safeguard and secure
the weapons and materials to keep them out of the global
marketplace. Under Project Sapphire, for example, we bought 600
kg of highly enriched uranium from Kazakstan to ensure that it
did not fall into the hands of nuclear smugglers.
But preventing proliferation means more than just
dismantling the Cold War nuclear arsenals. It also means leading
the world in the right direction, as we did last year in gaining
a consensus for the indefinite extension of the Nuclear non-
Proliferation Treaty. It means working to strengthen the
Biological Weapons Convention and ratifying the Chemical Weapons
Convention. It means taking the lead in a range of international
export controls to limit the flow of goods and technologies that
could be used to make weapons of mass destruction. During the
Cold War, for example, we had the COCOM regime of export
controls, designed to prevent the spread of dangerous
technologies to the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. Today, we are
creating the Wassenaar regime, set-up in cooperation with Russia,
updated to fit today's technology and designed to prevent the
spread of dangerous technologies to potential proliferators and
rogue regimes.
Preventing proliferation also means leading the
international community in opposing rogue nations with nuclear
and/or chemical weapon aspirations, such as Iran and Libya.
Economic sanctions and export controls have helped prevent Iran
from acquiring nuclear weapons and they have significantly slowed
Libya's efforts to put a chemical weapons production plant into
operation.
Sometimes preventing proliferation means employing coercive
diplomacy -- a combination of diplomacy and defense measures.
In North Korea, for example, we used such a combination to stop
that nation's nuclear weapons program. The diplomacy came from
the threat by the United States and other nations in the region
to impose economic sanctions if North Korea did not stop their
program and the promise of assistance in the production of
commercial power if they did. The defense came from our
simultaneous beefing up of our military forces in the region.
The result is that today, while North Korea continues to pose a
conventional military threat on the peninsula, it is not
mounting a nuclear threat.
Overall, the United States has been instrumental in
eliminating or reversing nuclear weapon programs in six states
since 1991: Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakstan, Iraq, North Korea and
South Africa. These efforts have made both America and the world
safer; and the gains to our national security have been dramatic,
direct and tangible. I can think of few more satisfying moments
in my life than when I turned the key to blow up that missile
silo in Pervomaysk.
But the story of preventive defense is not merely one of
preventing threats from weapons of mass destruction. It is also
the story of engaging military and defense establishments around
the world to further the spread of democracy and to further trust
and understanding among nations. Here, the results may be less
immediately tangible, but they are no less significant.
America has long understood that the spread of democracy to
more nations is good for America's national security. It has
been heartening this past decade to see so many nations around
the world come to agree with us that democracy is the best system
of government. But as the nations of the world attempt to act on
this consensus, we are seeing that there are important steps
between a world-wide consensus and a world-wide reality.
Democracy is learned behavior. Many nations today have
democracies that exist on paper, but, in fact, are extremely
fragile. Elections are a necessary but insufficient condition
for a free society. It is also necessary to embed democratic
values in the key institutions of nations.
The Defense Department has a key role to play in this
effort. It is a simple fact that virtually every country in the
world has a military. In virtually every new democracy -- in
Russia, in the newly free nations of the Former Soviet Union, in
Central and Eastern Europe, in South America, in the Asian Tigers
-- the military represents a major force. In many cases it is
the most cohesive institution. It often contains a large
percentage of the educated elite and controls key resources. In
short, it is an institution that can help support democracy or
subvert it.
We must recognize that each society moving from
totalitarianism to democracy will be tested at some point by a
crisis. It could be an economic crisis, a backslide on human
rights and freedoms, or a border or ethnic dispute with a
neighboring country. When such a crisis occurs, we want the
military to play a positive role in resolving the crisis, not a
negative role by fanning the flames of the crisis -- or even
using the crisis as a pretext for a military coup.
In these new democracies, we can choose to ignore this
important institution, or we can try to exert a positive
influence. We do have the ability to influence, indeed, every
military in the world looks to the U.S. armed forces as the model
to be emulated. That is a valuable bit of leverage that we can
put to use creatively in our preventive defense strategy.
In addition, if we can build trust and understanding between
the militaries of two neighboring nations, we build trust and
understanding between the two nations themselves. Some have said
that war is too important to be left solely to the generals.
Preventive defense says peace is too important to be left solely
to the politicians.
In this effort, preventive defense uses a variety of tools,
such as educating foreign officers at our military staff and
command colleges, where they learn how to operate in a democratic
society and how to operate under civilian control and with
legislative oversight. Over 200 officers from the Former Soviet
Union and Warsaw Pact countries are right now studying at U.S.
institutions, and another 60 are about to complete a special
course we have set up at the Marshall Center in Germany.
Another tool is sending out teams of American military
officers and civilians to help nations build modern, professional
military establishments under strong civilian defense leadership.
Since 1992, these teams have had thousands of contacts with
dozens of newly-free nations. These contacts have led Hungary,
for example, to enact new laws placing the Hungarian military
under civilian, democratic control. They have helped Romania
develop a new code of conduct for their military forces based on
the American military's Uniform Code of Military Justice. They
have helped Lithuania, Kazakstan, and Uzbekistan to improve their
training for Non-Commissioned Officers.
We also use tools such as joint training exercises in
peacekeeping, disaster relief and search and rescue operations.
We have held four such training exercises in the last year with
Russian troops -- two in Russia and two in the U.S. We also held
a joint peacekeeping exercise in Louisiana last July, involving
troops from fourteen nations with whom we had never had security
relations, including Albania and Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia,
Uzbekistan and Kazakstan, and all three Baltic nations. Next
month, I will meet up with the ministers of defense from Ukraine,
Russia, Poland and other nations for the opening ceremonies of an
exercise in Lviv, Ukraine.
Confidence-building measures are another important tool,
particularly in building trust between countries. One of the
most important confidence building measures is developing
openness about military budgets, plans and policies. Openness is
an unusual concept when it comes to defense. The art of war,
after all, involves secrecy and surprise, but the art of peace
involves exactly the opposite -- openness and trust. That's why
when I travel to newly democratic states, I try to set an example
by handing out copies of my annual report to Congress, which
details our defense budget and our security policies. I also
talk about legislative oversight and our budget process. These
concepts seem elementary to you and me, but to military officers
and defense officials who grew up under totalitarianism, they are
positively revolutionary.
In Europe and Central Asia, these tools of preventive
defense come together in a NATO program known as Partnership for
Peace, or PFP. The name Partnership for Peace was coined by
Joe Kruzel, a former fellow at the Center for Science and
International Affairs we honor today, who died while working for
peace in Bosnia last August.
Through Partnership for Peace, NATO is reaching out to the
nations of Eastern and Central Europe, Russia and the Newly
Independent States, and truly integrating them into the security
architecture of Europe. It used to be when the Secretary of
Defense went to meetings at NATO headquarters in Belgium, he sat
next to his counterpart from the United Kingdom. Today, when I
go to meetings in Belgium, I sit with my counterpart from
Uzbekistan on one side and the ministers from the United Kingdom
and Ukraine on the other.
Just as the Marshall Plan had an impact well beyond the
economies of Western Europe, PFP is echoing beyond the security
realm in Partner nations and into the political and economic
realms. PFP members are working to uphold democracy, tolerate
diversity, respect the rights of minorities and freedom of
expression. They are working to build market economies. They
are working hard to develop democratic control of their military
forces, to be good neighbors and to respect the sovereign rights
of bordering countries. They are working hard to make their
military forces compatible with NATO.
For those Partner countries that are embracing PFP as a path
to NATO membership, these actions are a key to opening that door.
For many of these nations, aspiration to NATO membership has
become the rock on which all major political parties base their
platforms. It is providing an overlapping consensus on a
unifying goal, making compromise and reconciliation on other
issues possible. To lock in the gains of reform, NATO must
ensure that the ties we are creating in PFP continue to deepen
and that we actually proceed with the gradual and deliberate, but
steady process of outreach and enlargement to the East.
Ultimately, PFP is doing more than just building the basis
for NATO enlargement. It is, in fact, creating a new zone of
security and stability throughout Europe, Russia and the NIS. By
forging networks of people and institutions working together to
preserve freedom, promote democracy and build free markets, PFP
today is a catalyst for transforming Central and Eastern Europe,
much as the Marshall Plan transformed Western Europe in the '40s
and '50s. In short, PFP is not just defense by other means, it
is democracy by other means; It is helping prevent the
realization of our fears for the post-Cold War era and taking us
closer to realizing our hopes.
One of these hopes is that Russia will participate in a
positive way in the new security architecture of Europe. Russia
has been a key part of the European security picture for over 300
years. It will remain a key player in the coming decades, for
better or worse. The job for the United States, NATO and Russia
is to make it for the better. Unlike with the Marshall Plan 50
years ago, Russia today has chosen to participate in Partnership
for Peace. We welcome Russia's participation, and hope that over
time it will take on a leading role in PFP commensurate with its
importance as a great power.
NATO's efforts to build cooperative ties with Russia
complement the bilateral efforts of the United States and Russia
to build what we call a pragmatic partnership -- another piece
of preventive defense. The pragmatic partnership involves
working with Russia in important areas where our interests
overlap, such as Nunn-Lugar; while trying to build trust and
cooperation through such things as military exchanges and joint
exercises.
The immediate payoff for our joint training with the PFP
nations and our efforts to build a cooperative relationship with
Russia has come, ironically, in Bosnia. Up until late last year,
to say that the future history of Europe is being written in
Bosnia, would have been a profoundly pessimistic statement.
Today, however, this statement qualifies as guarded optimism; not
only because there is satisfactory compliance with the Dayton
peace agreement, but because of the way IFOR has been put
together and because of the way it is performing. IFOR is not a
peacekeeping exercise it is the real thing. Fourteen Partner
nations have joined NATO nations in shouldering the
responsibility in IFOR. A Russian brigade is operating as part
of an American division in IFOR -- the top Russian commander in
Bosnia, General Shevtsov, visited your Center for Science and
International Affairs just last week. NATO itself has a renewed
sense of purpose and sense of its own ability to put together a
force for a post-Cold War military mission. This is all positive
history, and it shows why I believe that Bosnia is turning out to
be the crucible for the creation of Marshall's Europe.
We are also seeking to use the tools of preventive defense
to prevent the occurrence of future Bosnias. Last month, I
attended a conference of ministers of defense in Tirana, Albania,
directed to the specific military cooperation and confidence
building measures that would be most effective in building peace
and stability in the South Balkans. The enthusiasm of these
leaders for the tools of preventive defense made me very hopeful
that we can be effective in preventing future conflict in this
famously troubled region.
Our hopes for democracy and regional understanding and our
opportunities to support them through the tools of preventive
defense are not confined to Europe. We have these same hopes and
opportunities here in our own Hemisphere. Ten years ago, Latin
America was made up mostly of dictatorships, but today, 34
nations in our hemisphere -- all the nations save one -- are
democracies. I have tried to seize this opportunity by opening
relationships with the defense ministries of these countries.
Our efforts came to a climax last summer when I invited the
defense ministers from the other 33 hemispheric democracies to
join me at Williamsburg, Virginia, to discuss confidence building
measures and defense cooperation designed to minimize the risk of
conflict in the hemisphere. The conference was a resounding
success. As a result, today we are not only seeing increased
cooperation between the U.S. and Latin American militaries, we
are also seeing cooperation between and among the Latin American
militaries themselves -- with renewed efforts to resolve
outstanding disputes peacefully and create new levels of
confidence. A second hemispheric ministerial meeting is
scheduled to be held in Argentina this fall.
Preventive defense also has a role in our effort to manage
our relationship with China. We are using some of these same
tools to build cooperative security ties between the United
States and China. We do this not because China is a new
democracy -- it obviously is not. Rather, we do it because China
is a major world power with whom we share important interests,
with whom we have strong disagreements, and which has a powerful
military that has significant influence on the policies that
China follows. We do it, ultimately, because we believe when it
comes to strategic intentions, engagement is almost always better
than ignorance.
That is why we have sent teams to China to present our
strategic thinking, and have invited the Chinese to reciprocate.
It is why we are encouraging exchanges between academic
institutions within our military structures. And it is why we
have conducted reciprocal ship visits and tours by senior
officers. In the best case, engaging China's military will allow
us to have a positive influence on this important player in
Chinese politics, opening the way for Chinese cooperation on
proliferation and regional security issues. At the very least,
engagement between our two military establishments will improve
our understanding of each other, thus lowering the chances for
miscalculation and conflict.
What makes preventive defense work -- whether it is in
Russia, Europe, the Balkans, Latin America, or China -- is
American leadership. There is no other country in the world with
the ability to reach out to so many corners of the globe. There
is no other country in the world whose efforts to do so are so
respected. At the same time, no one should think that preventive
defense is a philanthropic venture -- it is not. It's about hard
work and ingenuity today, so that we don't have to expend blood
and treasure tomorrow.
While preventive defense holds great promise for preventing
conflict, we must appreciate that it is a strategy for
influencing the world -- not compelling it to our will. We must
frankly and soberly acknowledge that preventive defense will not
always work. That is why as Secretary of Defense, my top
priority is still maintaining strong, ready forces and the will
to use them to deter and defeat threats to our interests. We
still maintain a smaller but still highly effective nuclear
arsenal. We have a robust, threat-based, ballistic missile
defense program. We maintain the best conventional forces in the
world, many of which are forward-deployed in both Europe and the
Asia-Pacific, and we continue to maximize our technological
advantage over any potential foe, giving us dominance on any
battlefield in the world. These forces and capabilities, coupled
with the political will to use them, allow the United States to
be very effective at deterring conflict around the world. These
same capabilities and forces mean that if we cannot prevent or
deter conflict, we can defeat aggression quickly and with a
minimum of casualties.
The converse is also true. If we can prevent the conditions
for conflict, we reduce the risk of having to send our forces
into harm's way to deter or defeat aggression. The pivotal role
of preventive defense, however, is not widely known to the
public. Indeed, it is not well understood even by national
security experts. The same was true, in fact, about the Marshall
Plan in its early days. The Marshall Plan did not arise full
grown like Venus from the shell. Indeed, George Marshall often
maintained that when he gave his speech at Harvard in 1947, he
did not present a Marshall Plan. He said, instead, that it was
a proposal, but he did not simply offer his proposal and go home.
Marshall the statesman was a visionary man, but Marshall the
soldier was also a practical man. As a practical man, he
recognized that in a democracy, no national proposal, especially
one involving US engagement in the world, becomes a reality
unless you can win public support. The Marshall proposal became
the Marshall Plan because George Marshall spent the next year
going directly to the public and seeking its support.
Today, I am not issuing a proposal for preventive defense,
but rather a report on how it is already shaping our world and
the world of future generations in a positive way. But in order
for preventive defense to succeed as an approach to national
security, we, too, need to convince the American people. We
need to convince America that at this pivotal point in history,
as we seek to realize our fondest hopes for the revolutionary era
in which we live, our engagement with the world and the programs
supporting preventive defense are critical to our security. I
have chosen the Kennedy School to present my thoughts on
preventive defense because as scholars, the students and faculty
here are uniquely equipped to understand what is at stake when we
talk about preventive defense. As leaders and future policy
makers, you are also uniquely equipped to explain the benefits of
preventive defense to the American public and to take the
concepts I have talked about today and expand upon them in your
own careers. I urge you to do so.
-->